The 124-year-old bathhouse on East 10th Street has long been a New York institution, a bona fide melting pot, where the sweat of celebrities mingles with that of rabbis and taxi drivers. It’s where downtown denizens have gone to detox and discuss the deeper things of life, and where Orthodox Jewish men have gone to convene, or to hide from their wives. For much of its existence it has been a men’s club for those far beyond the age of vanity.

The storied baths are housed in the basement of an East Village tenement. Women were allowed just one day a week until the 1980s, when Mr. Tuberman and Mr. Shapiro gradually made nearly every day coed.